


The Last Firefly

by Achleys



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Bottom Will Graham, Crazy Will, Established Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal Lecter is a Cannibal, Hannibal Lecter is a Killer, Hannibal and Will Have Sex When Will is Mentally Unsound, Hannibal is a Monster, Implied/Referenced Sex, Longing, M/M, Madness, Masturbation, Naked Hannibal and Will, Pscyhosis, Psychological Trauma, Sad Will, Someone Help Will Graham, Time Skips, Top Hannibal Lecter, Will Discovers Hannibal is a Killer Cannibal, Will Eats Too Many Fireflies, Will is Not a Killer, Will is a Mess, Will is an Accidental Cannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:00:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24593407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Achleys/pseuds/Achleys
Summary: Will collapses into fiery madness after discovering a body in Hannibal's basement.It was silent, the sound of his destruction.A short, extremely disjointed and chaotic one shot dedicated to Will's discovery and Hannibal's ultimate decision.
Relationships: Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 10
Kudos: 38





	The Last Firefly

It was silent, the sound of his destruction.

In the end, Will perished the way so many great men do. With a sigh, notable only for how completely the gods declined the sunder the rest of the world with him.

Notable, too, for how Hannibal Lecter failed to hold him together as he burned.

* * * * *

Now, there is a monster outside of his room. But Will, still drowning in fire, can do little more than beckon it to him the only way he knows how.

And so, Will is beautiful and he is limp.

Listless, even as he moves in soft, roiling waves of mewls and groans. All the loose-muscled vernacular of _mmm_ s and _uhh_ s that draws him up, up, up towards the heady press of stars he has not seen in so long.

“Beautiful,” breathes the monster.

And he is. He is so pretty.

Will arches in response, bending his back like a string pulled taut. The burn in his groin feels good, the words coming from on-high feel good, and Will wonders if perhaps, this time, his spine might snap.

He is fire and he is oil. He is the absence of air and he is breathtaking to behold.

The cloying smell of the hospital, the scratch of stiff sheets beneath his fingers and knees, they rear as a disquieted twang plucked by the trembling fingers of a child. He whines and the sound is as beautiful as he is.

But there is a monster outside of his room and now, Will beckons him.

Will breathes _yes_ , and he breathes _please_ , and he breathes _more_. He grips flesh that is not his own between smoldering fingers that cannot be his. And with each shaky moan, he cries out for the shadows to reclaim the monster to their depths. In words that sound like _harder_ , like _oh god_ , like _Hannibal_ , Will says the shadows must, they _must_ take the monster back if Will is to survive burning.

But then, long, adroit fingers press into his skin. And Will inhales and he feels good. He feels good, and he feels good, and he feels good.

He is a young puppy, a soft kitten, a plush animal bright-eyed on a shelf and he groans and rakes static skin across fabric. Slower, then, until the webbing between his fingers grips tendrils of grass, bright and verdantly gray, and he pulls.

The grass moans and Will moans and he is laying on his back. Even like that, bared against instincts, exposed, he is a devastating sight.

And then, he is alone. The pulse in the shape of fingertips to the side of his cheek achingly meager to the pulse between his legs. He grips himself, feels the tendrils of earthen roots still lingering in his hand, and groans, loud, to the starved sigh of _beautiful_ in his aural periphery.

* * * * *

Now, the cotton is rough and the smells are rough and Will doesn’t want to flinch, but does.

"I thought he was coming around. Will? Will, it’s Dr. Chilton, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

Will, he cannot open his eyes, but knows how to press, raise his lips into a sneer. There are fireflies all around him, fluttering and large and he cannot help the noise he makes as he leans, grabs one between fingers soiled with dirt. The crack it makes in his palm is alive and unholy. He bends forward and licks the lightbulb glow seeping along the crevices of his hand.

When he raises his head to look around the room, he is alone. He winds his tongue across his fingers, inhaling crumbles of ash that taste of loam, and spreads the effervescence until his entire hand is alight. He raises it to the room.

_Beautiful._

He touches his chest, but flames erupt, so he stops. He is sitting, so he lays down and presses his hand to his cheek.

It is warm, and Will is warm, and the monster is quiet, so he sleeps.

* * * * *

Then, there was a man Will did not know. A man he did not know, garroted and hanging in Hannibal’s basement.

He was quite clearly dead, though it was not the man’s most striking feature. Nor was it his nakedness, which was muted as best such a thing could be by his death and the presence of the two naked men before him.

It was, instead, the clean, rectangular pieces of missing flesh, severed, as Will could see, by deft, knowledgeable hands from torso and thigh and the weight of dinner in Will's gut.

It was the man beside Will, sweat and salt still drying on his skin from Will’s mouth, his hands. It was the ringing, pounding cataclysm of the man’s last words – _you’re beautiful, god, you’re so beautiful_ – that ultimately summoned the flames.

* * * * *

Now, there is a monster outside of Will’s room.

It caws and it snorts. Growls and whines and wickers. And Will, he whines with it, arching his back in the way that will forever cast him into the shadowy realm of the gods. _Stunning_ , he thinks, is sure he looks, around the approaching flames. _Ravishing, ravished_ , as he winds a hand across his chest. As he presses his palm harder to his groin.

And so Will beckons the monster the only way he knows how.

“Typical regression, Alana,” the void around Will says and he is sure, is certain the shadows would refuse him now. Sure, as his gut bottoms out beneath him, that pestilence brims with impatience at the edges of the monster’s mouth. Waiting for the heavens to close, for the flames to finally consume Will as he drowns. Perched in the shadows that birthed it, until it can finally, _finally_ eat him alive.

“Or, quite possibly, a coping mechanism,” the monster says and Will can hear, he can _hear_ the restless swarm of insects thrumming against the roof of its mouth. “Will may simply be repeating the activity in which he was engaged moments before-”

Will arches further, presses the pads of his feet and the crown of his head against the insufferable cotton that pokes with sticky fingers into the cavities of his body, and looks at the monster behind him with closed eyelids.

“Enough,” Will says. “It’s enough.”

The monster, it smiles and if Will could still flinch, he would.

The burning maw erupts with fireflies, as beautiful as Will is, and he eats until he cannot move over the ache in his stomach.

* * * *

Sometimes, rarely, and always very late into the night, the monster comes to Will and speaks to him of things much like the truth. In words that sound like _listen_ , like _please_ , like _betrayal_ , it speaks of those precious few moments when it and Will stood naked. When it was not yet, not quite a monster, but the prelude to a looming storm.

Still, Will can only ever speak of the flames. Of how the light had danced obscenely behind his closed eyes and the few moments Will had danced with it. How he’d been rapturous, joyous as a bright, enveloping reign of destruction fell to devour mankind for the blasphemy he’d discovered in the bowels of that house.

Sometimes, rarely, or perhaps not at all, Will speaks of how he was nourished, even as the fire began. When he’d looked across that gray stone floor and over the dozens of upturned faces, the furrowed brows, the opened palms of the men, the women, the children that had all perished there long before he’d burned. There, in that basement, with Will and the shadowy figure at his back that was then only a herald, Will speaks of the comfort found in the cries of _why, god, why?_ structured and contained the way only mortal men can when the heavens summon a reckoning.

And a reckoning it surely was.

* * * * *

Now, Will is terrible in his beauty.

Filled as he is by each hot breath, each aching thrust.

_Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful._

The word arcs across the chasm of the dark forest before them, scrawled in a luminous script by a hand he knows. Chased only by the lilting flutter of fireflies and a distant storm. A sharp crash of lightening, the spread of ozone, and Will’s pale hands are alight before him. He can see them in the glass partition of his hospital room. Strong, sturdy, gripping coarse linen to the point of tearing. He watches his unsteady reflection bend, arch like a bow against a force he has neither the desire nor ability to abate.

From between where his fists grip torn cotton, Will snatches at a firefly. He says, “You won’t leave here alive,” and breaks it between his fingers, between strong, capable hands. He eats only what he can lick from his cupped palm.

He wonders if this time, perhaps, he too will break.

The monster looms over him. It melds into the peaks and valleys of Will’s shoulders, his spine, so much the same way Will still pleads with the shadows to take it back. In words that sound like _monster_ , like _monster_ , like _monster_ , Will cries out. He moans until he is growling and snapping, with canines grown far too long, at anything that is not him, that is not Hannibal. Until he is rutting, mindlessly, into the torn spread below them, the monster’s name painted deep in the contours of his back and fingers.

Later, “He never says anything but your name, you know.” 

Later, Will falls limp. _Limp. Limp, limp, limp_ , like deflated architecture. Like the wilting forlorn of a lover cast to an unseemly byline to wait. Like a man alight, aglow, luminous with the insatiable desire to devour all that might be held in reverence above him.

A man on fire.

* * * * *

Then, in the basement, Will was drowning 

_Why, god, why?_

“Will.”

That voice, Will was sure it commanded locust plagues. Certain in the way only dying men are that it was demanding dry springs, blood and parasites and disease. Even then, even as his skin caught fire, Will could feel the weight of it, heavy and overripe, on the flat of his tongue. His fingers ached for want to tear himself to pieces.

And surely, _surely_ the heavens must have quaked with similar desires as Will burned.

“Will.”

The voice sounded tired, so tired and Will, he was tired, too.

And Will knew, if he could have, that he would have set fire to the fields of those men, those women, those children long before then. Burned each village, each crofter’s cottage, each sloppy vegetable garden with careful, aching precision. He would have watched, enlightened as anguish spilled across burnt land and burnt bodies and maybe then, perhaps, he could have been satiated by the offering hung before him.

Instead, with cold, bare feet clinging to cold, bare ground, he asked, “How did this not end the world?”

He spoke the words to no one, nothing. Spoke out loud if only because dead men cannot speak. And if he could hear the words . . . maybe, perhaps, perhaps then he could be an aberration unfit for the world. Perhaps he could ascend or descend from that plane, from the man behind him with skin salty and wet.

“It has,” said the harbinger, “but only for a moment.”

Hannibal stopped next to him. He was close enough that Will could hear him breathe. Could feel a tenuous tremor beneath skin too tight, too vibrant with understanding. A protective loop-and-coil adhesive over a heart beating only that much too fast with knowledge.

With decision.

They surveyed the basement together.

Will asked, “Is there any chance I’ll leave here alive?”

“No,” was the response but it was soft, merciful. “Not if your first instinct was to run.”

He gave Will a single, limp butterfly to gorge on.

* * * * *

Now, the fireflies no longer circle near. Will must crouch, hidden in the darkest reach of his cell, and pounce when they finally land on his cot, his dresser, his desk. There is a note of terror in the rigidity of their wings as he swallows, in the thorax, and Will finds he does not enjoy the taste.

* * * * *

Then, Hannibal asked, “Has the world resumed spinning?”

“Not yet,” Will said, his mouth filled with fluttering wings. “So-so what am I looking at, exactly?”

He said the words as though he was not already stained. As though he could not, in that moment, feel the monster’s claws, the voice’s teeth, their _essence_ , all those countless inhales and exhales breathed across the bare expanse of Will’s skin. As though they weren’t already so implanted into the muscle and sinew of his body as to be his alone.

As though he’d ever choose otherwise.

The monster’s hands. Hands which destroyed and cut and _fed_ and which, only minutes before, had brought Will’s beauty into a blistering light. Hands. Hands, hands, hands and long, adroit fingers which pressed into the small of Will’s back as he arched and conjured noises from Will he had not known he could make. Hands which touched, groped, skimmed in words that sounded like _mine_ , like _possession_ , like an offering to a higher realm as proof of the divines themselves.

Will arched with a moan drawn from the lifetime he’d spent suspended and floating in that basement, and the demon beside him captured the noise with teeth stained blue, purple, and red with the dying sun, and it was a reward that set Will’s very marrow on fire.

“Forget it, let’s go back to bed,” Will breathed between them in words that sounded like _why, god, why._

“Will.”

“Hannibal,” he said and the room alighted in flames.

The monster brought one slender, profane hand to Will’s cheek and Will collapsed at the touch.

* * * * *

Now, the monster looks at Will behind the glass partition of his room.

Will does not ask a question, does not speak as he continues to burn, and so Hannibal does not respond.

As the silence lengthens, deepens, prompted by an instinct Will does not understand, it says, “I thought I had more time.”

“More time,” Will repeats.

“I thought I had more time,” Hannibal says again and in that moment, Will would have given his soul, his humanity to have burned that house to the ground. To have forced them to hide in that basement, debased by Will’s discovery, and await what they both deserved.

“I don’t understand,” Will says, and then he does. “What I did to Garr-that’s not what you do, it’s not what you _did_.”

“That would appear to be a matter of perspective.”

“A miscalculation,” Will says, but then, “You can’t _leave_.”

“We’re not so different, Will,” says Hannibal, says the spider to the fly. “But we may be different enough.”

And through the glass, the monster embraces him. With two hands, with four, with six, with twelve, until Will is enclosed. Until Will opens his eyes to the spread of grass and sand and island, a seductive summer isle awash in the drunken sin of his knowledge, his knowing, what he now knows.

* * * * *

Now, Will comes to himself, from the fires, much like the not-noise of a furnace kicking off. And with it, he recites: _As a horse when he has run, a dog when he tracked the game, a bee when it has made the honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes onto another act, as a vine goes on to produce against the grapes in season._

 _But what of men who value destruction?_ Will thinks this as he peers through the poor lighting beyond the spread of plexiglass. Beyond where white coveralls spare his skin from the nakedness he feels spilling from his mouth. Where Alana Bloom and Frederick Chilton and Jack Crawford stand, a swarm of bees to drive away the fireflies, with lips pressed tight and eyebrows together. _What of men whose very subsistence is that of destruction?_

The eyes looking back at him offer little by way of answer and dull further when he asks, “Where’s Hannibal?”

It is Alana who looks away first. And with it, Will feels the stir of a dozen fireflies in flight behind him. Dozens more unfurl when Dr. Chilton tries, fails to catch Jack’s eye and even more when Jack sighs at his hands.

Will does his best to ignore the hundreds of twitching, flapping wings that erupt around him when he asks, “When was Hannibal last here?”

* * * * *

It takes Will weeks to eat the fireflies. In the end, he thinks perhaps he never liked the taste.

He sits naked on the concrete floor of his hospital room with the very last of its kind perched on his shoulder. He wonders fleetingly, disinterested if it is not cruel to breed hope in a creature that watched as Will broke and consumed hundreds of its brethren with the systematic fervor of an automaton. He wonders if Hannibal might disagree.

But the last firefly, it flaps its wings and doesn’t seem to mind. And really, neither does Will.

He takes it from his shoulder to hold gently between cupped hands. The firefly is docile, still, collapsed. Will's head bows and into the space between his fingers, he breathes, “You are _so_ beautiful,” before crushing it between his palms.

When he licks clean the last trace of the monster from himself, the fires return.

On his back, exposed as he is, Will cannot help the high, piercing moan that escapes from somewhere deep in his chest. Nor can he help the way _Hannibal_ falls from his mouth in words that sound like _take me_ , like _mine_ , like _forgiveness_ and _why_ and many, many more as the flames encroach. Until he arches, he groans and the needless, burning destruction of it all finally rears high enough to consume him whole.


End file.
